Chad Aldeman, Bellwether Education Partners, digs into the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) implementation timetable: “To get a sense of why this matters, it’s important to consider the timeline ESSA laid out. As of August 1 this year, NCLB is dead, and, so are any waivers issued under NCLB. States are busy preparing their new accountability systems, which must be in place beginning with the 2017-18 school year, and states will be submitting their plans in the spring and summer of 2017.”

Julien Vasquez Heilig covers the charter school debate within and between civil rights groups. The blog includes several media clips on the following topics: (1) NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charter schools. Do charters have more freedom and less accountability?; (2) What’s the role of inequality in fueling the charter movement? What is the alternative to private-control and privatization of resources for public education?; and (3) Do charter students perform better? What are the alternatives to charters that have 400-1000% more impact?

Nat Malkus, writing for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, discusses charter schools and public schools using national data. “The results show that which ‘traditional’ [sic] public schools you compare charters to matters a lot.”

Stephen Kotok, Sakiko Ikoma and Katerina Bodovski discuss how high schools can keep students from dropping out. Based on a recently published article in the American Journal of Education, ‘School Climate and Dropping Out of School in an Era of Accountability,’ the authors investigate the impact of school climate, organization, and composition on dropout decisions. “Although devoting time and resources to the improvement of school climate may seem like a distraction from instructional and test prep time, our research suggests that such process of capacity building is critical and ultimately raises the level of academic success over time.”